AIA

Gavin Newsom tells Jim Clyburn that he’d have trouble complying with the SAVE Act because he doesn’t know where to find his birth certificate: “You've got to find your birth certificate. I have no clue where mine is." Good lord. Just beyond parody.

Just read this on Fb. Sharing here. I did not know this. More in the comments. Los Angeles, October 1969. Daniel Ellsberg stood alone in a darkened room, the rhythmic green flash of a Xerox machine, the only light. Outside, the city slept. Inside, Ellsberg was copying 7,000 pages of classified documents that could send him to prison for the rest of his life. He wasn't a radical. He wasn't anti-American. He was a former Marine. A Harvard PhD. A trusted Pentagon analyst who'd helped plan the Vietnam War strategy. And he'd just read the truth the government was hiding from the American people. The documents were called the Pentagon Papers—a top-secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Ellsberg had security clearance to read them. What he found destroyed him. The papers proved that four consecutive presidents—Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson—had systematically lied to the American public about Vietnam. They knew the war was unwinnable. They knew it early. They continued it anyway. They knew more troops wouldn't change the outcome. They sent more troops anyway. They knew the casualty projections. They sent young men to die anyway. By 1969, over 30,000 Americans had been killed. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were dead. And the documents in Ellsberg's hands proved that every administration had known, privately, that it was all futile. Ellsberg had believed in the war. He'd spent two years in Vietnam as an analyst. He'd been a true believer. Reading those documents shattered him. He realized he'd been complicit in a lie that was killing thousands. He had a choice: keep the secret, or risk everything to expose it. For weeks, he agonized. He had a family. A career. A life. Releasing classified documents was espionage. He'd face 115 years in prison. But keeping silent meant watching more Americans die for a lie. He made his decision. The copying process was agonizingly slow. The Pentagon Papers filled 47 volumes—7,000 pages. Ellsberg couldn't copy them at work; security was too tight. He had to smuggle sections out, hidden in his briefcase. A friend gave him access to a Xerox machine at an advertising agency after hours. Night after night, Ellsberg stood there alone, feeding pages through the copier. The work was exhausting and terrifying. Every car passing outside could be the FBI. Then he realized he needed help. The process was too slow—more Americans were dying every week. So he did something extraordinary. He asked his children to help him. Robert was 13. Mary was 10. On weekends, Ellsberg took them to the office. Robert ran the copier. Mary sat on the floor with scissors, carefully cutting the "TOP SECRET" stamps off the top of every page. Imagine that scene: a father teaching his children that sometimes breaking the law is the most moral thing you can do. That sometimes patriotism means betraying your government to serve your country. Mary later remembered asking her father what would happen when people found out. Ellsberg knelt down to her level and said: "Daddy might go to prison for a very long time. But someone has to tell the truth, even when it's scary." For two years, Ellsberg tried the "right" way. He approached senators and congressmen, begging them to enter the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record, which would make them public without legal risk to him. They all refused. Even anti-war politicians were too afraid. So in March 1971, Ellsberg gave the papers to the New York Times. On June 13, 1971, the Times began publishing excerpts. The country exploded. The Nixon administration immediately sued to stop publication—the first time in American history the government sought prior restraint on a newspaper. When the Times was ordered to stop, Ellsberg gave the papers to the Washington Post. When they were threatened, he gave them to the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Christian Science Monitor.